The Millions Top Ten: February 2016

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We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for February.

For the first time in five years, but also the third time in six, Jonathan Franzen sent one of his books to our site’s Hall of Fame. And with the ascension of Purity, that makes Franzen three-for-three on his most recent novels reaching such hallowed ground. (Sorry, Kraus Project, but it looks like the streak is limited to fiction; and sorry as well, Strong Motion, but it looks like you arrived before the Franz-y* picked up full force; you’ll have to content yourself with Brain Ted Jones’sMillions essay instead of a HoF berth.)

Filling Purity‘s spot this month is The Past by Tessa Hadley, which was featured in both our Second-Half 2015 and also our Great 2016 Book Previews. The novel concerns siblings who reunite to sell their grandparents’ old house, but it really shouldn’t be summed up by its plot. The author would protest. After all, in an interview for our site last year, Hadley remarked upon the dangers that come from focusing too narrowly on plot and sequential order, and how she controls that impulse when she writes:

Things in life don’t, on the whole, add up or get resolved in that deliciously satisfactory, finalizing way that novels are so good at. Nineteenth-century novelists resolved their plotty novels so magnificently because they shared convictions about meaning and fulfillment that we surely mislaid somewhere in the 20th century. But I do believe that “leaping over the gaps” doesn’t mean you can’t hold a story together. Rather, we’ve grown suspicious of stories that resolve too satisfactorily. The danger is that if you fill in all the gaps you lose the essence of the story, you write something stodgy and merely consecutive, instead of keeping your hand on the live wire of the life, which jumps from place to place.

Elsewhere on this month’s list we see Marlon James’sA Brief History… move up on spot, which is good because that means you’re listening to my repeatedpleas for you to buy that book. It also appears that next month our list will welcome two new additions, as both Fates and Furies and The Heart Goes Last seem destined for the Hall of Fame.

We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for August.

Thomas Pynchon staged an impressive debut in August, hitting number one in The Millions Top Ten as Inherent Vice hit shelves. Garth, our resident Pynchon expert, shared his thoughts on the post-modern detective story just this week. Also debuting on our list in August is yet another title from Roberto Bolaño. Out of the gate, The Skating Rink is looking less like a footnote in Bolaño’s prolific career and more like another Bolaño masterpiece, receiving impressive notices from the likes of Wyatt Mason in The New York Times (a “short, exquisite novel“) and Scott Esposito in The Quarterly Conversation (“well worth your time“). The book was also on our most recent “Most Anticipated Books” list.

We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for July.

July is the month of revolutions, writes Tom Nissley, and the theory is borne out in our July Top Ten. Not only do we have a new number one, but we also have four newcomers to our list — this in spite of the fact that not a single book from our June Top Ten graduated into our hallowed Hall of Fame. Are you intrigued? Then let’s get right to it.

Rachel Cantor’sA Highly Unlikely Scenario continues its months-long ascent up our list. When it debuted at #8 in May, I attributed its success to its placement on our Great 2014 Book Preview, but it looks like Millions readers have grown more and more intrigued ever since. Last month, Cantor’s book rose all the way to #2, and now it’s finally edged Jess Walter’sBeautiful Ruins out of the top spot. What will August hold in store for Cantor’s novel about “competing giant fast food factions rul[ing] the world?” Only time will tell.

Likewise, the debut of Karl Ove Knausgaard’sMy Struggle: Book 1 is understandable — and, frankly, overdue — considering the immense hype it’s been getting lately. When Jonathan Callahanreviewed the book’s early installments for our site last year (which feels like ages ago…), he wrote of the autobiographical project:
With astounding single-mindedness (or monomania, if you prefer), Knausgaard conceives of and then executes the writing project that both consumes him and sequesters him from life. He’s Ahab, only with the final volume’s publication — which reportedly concludes with whatever the Norwegian is for “I am no longer an author” — he’s gone and caught the whale.
At the time, it seemed an unlikely candidate for breakout success. But oh, how wrong we were. Since last year, Knausgaard’s earned himself praise in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and more. He’s packed standing-room-only bookstore readings and he’s been talked about about just about every bar in New York. In fact there were rumors recently that the book was so popular in the author’s native Norway that the country had to institute “Knausgaard-free days” in order to keep its economy humming.

Also joining the list this month are books by Louise Erdrich and Francine Prose. The Round House has been knocking on the Top Ten’s door since its publication in 2012, and Reading Like a Writer seems like it’s perfectly suited for most of our readers.

One comment:

City On Fire is such a great book and in my opinion did not deserve the mediocre reviews. If it wasn’t for the hype for the advance it would have received a much better rating from fans. It was pretty much set up for failure.

We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for December.